The Economic Essentials of Digital Strategy

This white paper was written by Angus Dawson, Martin Hirt, and Jay Scanlan. It was sponsored by SAFEbuilt and originally published by the McKinsey Quarterly in March of 2016 and republished by the Alliance for Innovation as part of their 2016 BIG Ideas conference.

In July 2015, during the championship round of the World Surf League’s J-Bay Open, in South Africa, a great white shark attacked Australian surfing

star Mick Fanning. Right before the attack, Fanning said later, he had the eerie feeling that “something was behind me.”1 Then he turned and saw the fin.

Thankfully, Fanning was unharmed. But the incident reverberated in the surfing world, whose denizens face not only the danger of loss of limb or life from sharks—surfers account for nearly half of all shark victims—but also the uncomfortable, even terrifying feeling that can accompany unseen perils.